In Venice, again...

This has been an extraordinary travel year for me. This time last year Nancy and I planned another Tauck cruise as a way to take my mind off upcoming surgery, and deliberately set the date for October 2010 in case I wasn't well enough by spring.

So then Leah and I went to Spain and France for 3 weeks in May, and I went to Transylvania and Austria and Paris in August, and less than six weeks after returning from THAT trip Nancy and I took off for Holland, Venice and a short cruise down the Adriatic on the 23rd of September.

After a busy week in Holland, where we visited with the people who made us so welcome in 2008, we came to Venice a couple of days early, to have time to explore before the tour takes up. I now no longer remember how many times I've been here, but Nancy had never come to Venice, and it's fun to take a first-time visitor to some of my favorite places.

It's raining a bit, but that doesn't matter. There are lots of other visitors, but that doesn't matter either, because no matter how crowded Venice gets, there is always a quiet place just down a side passage.

Tomorrow we join the group for a welcome dinner, and Sunday the land part of the cruise takes off. Meantime, we're enjoying the style & comfort & old-fashioned elegance of the Hotel Danieli (incredibly different from my usual lodgings here - fun to be somewhere really upscale at least once!)

Pictures later, perhaps. Note: the Bellini from the hotel bar is a fine drink - can't believe Harry's Bar would do it any better (and it's farther than we want to walk tonight anyway!)

Solstice

September is the breakout breakup heartbreak month, not all the time, but often enough.

Tonight Ian and I went to a vernissage - the opening of a show of watercolors by a longtime family friend. He was easy to find in the crowd of well-wishers, because he spent the evening sitting on a tall chair near the middle of the room - "Doctor's orders!"

This in no way muted his natural ebullience. Though he had trouble articulating, he lit up as each visitor came to offer congratulations on a series of small elegant pictures that eloquently capture a place he knows and loves.

He is very ill - so ill that we may not see him again. According to someone we spoke to, our friend wasn't sure he would make this date.

It's the turn of the year, an early fall that is colder and wetter than usual. Since July, two people I've known for years have died in car accidents. A member of our family is contending with a series of health problems. Listening to the news makes me alternately furious or despairing.

While waiting for a bus on the way home, I decided to focus on the almost-full moon, just then making a pale showing in the eastern sky.

The last time I saw Paris...

...it was raining even harder than in Seattle tonight. In spite of the rain, it's not particularly cold - the balcony door is open, and Sparky comes and goes.

I'm sure the rain hasn't spoiled the Storm victory parade and celebration at the Seattle Center. The team had a splendid season, topped off by winning the WNBA championship in three straight games, and their loyal, enthusiastic fans are ready to celebrate.

Sometimes September is warmer than summer here, but not this year.

A rainy month is a good time to read. Before the Seattle Public Library shut down for its late August - early September furlough (second year for a regrettable event forced on the system by budget cutbacks) I lugged home an assorted bagful. Although the books weren't all from the same section of the library, they all focused on England, something I didn't actually plan.

I like English mysteries, especially those set in familiar places. Right now I'm working through Peter Turnbull's series of police procedurals set in York.

"Arts and Letters Daily" is an excellent source of on-line articles and reviews. In an article about successful children of famous parents, I read about Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel's son, who lived well into the 20th century, and had his own literary career. In search of his autobiography, published after his death by his widow, I found instead Hawthorne and His Circle, a delightful memoir Hawthorne wrote in 1903. While it focuses on his father and mother and their well-known friends, the book highlights Julian's childhood memories of these people mixed with his reflections on growing up in a charmed atmosphere.

The Hawthorne family spent seven years in England and Italy. According to Julian, Nathaniel particularly loved England, regarding it as "the ancestral home." If his life had not been cut short, four years after the family returned to America, Julian believed his father would have returned to England to live.

My first job was in a small-town library, where one of the duties was to get new books ready for the shelves. In those days, this involved putting the dust jacket into a plastic cover, pasting in a pocket for the circulation card, and embossing the library name on "the secret page" - a way to identify the book in case it met with some disaster.

SPL books now have computer chips instead of card pockets, and you can check out books without ever interacting with another human. But Julian's book is old - I was fascinated to discover that the Seattle Public Library put it into circulation on April 10, 1913 (according to a fading date stamp.) Another stamp records the date it was sent to the bindery, to reappear in familiar green hardboard. The book still has a checkout card and pocket inside the back cover - last used in 1967.

The book didn't register on the check-out pad. "It's so old that it has to be hand-checked," explained the counter clerk, who pasted a dime-size orange dot onto the book's cover to remind me to hand it to a real person when I returned it.

Here's another picture of Paris in unsettled weather, taken from the Pont de Grenelle.

When the Paris high is lower than Seattle's low....

...it's almost time to go home! Amidst reports of record-breaking hot weather in Seattle, we listened to the steady drip drip drip of rain today - then went out in it anyway.

The Sunday market at Place de Bastille, always a lively scene, was almost as crowded as ever, and you had to be careful to dodge the umbrellas. We bought a slice of farm-made Brie, a small Charentais melon, some small sweet green plums, a bottle of Beaujolais Villages red, and a long baguette topped with poppy seeds. The bread man sliced it in half so it would fit into a bag that could be kept dry for the trip home.


(No pretzels at a Paris market, so far as I know - these pictures are from Salzburg!)

And tomorrow's holiday is...

...Assumption Day, freely acknowledged by Parisians to be the deadest day of summer. We hope at least one Sunday market will be up & running as usual.

Today the streets were very quiet, except near tourist gathering places, and even in a well-known and well-loved neighborhood bistro the lunch crowd was sparse.

We lingered a long time over lunch because a spell of heavy rain sent water running down the streets and splashing off outdoor tables. When it finally stopped, the afternoon turned bright and clear.

Museums are open even if the shops are not. On Thursday we went to Rouen, to see the cathedral, and also to see a special exhibition at the Musee des Beaux Arts - "Impressionists in Rouen." Someone had a brilliant idea to assemble paintings by all the Impressionists - famous and otherwise - who spent time in Rouen, and the result is attracting visitors from all over.

Highlight of the exhibition is the room which features at least 10 of Monet's pictures of Rouen Cathedral, painted at all different times of the day to show how light changes the look of an object from hour to hour.

Two of the cathedral paintings belong in Rouen (part of the museum's excellent collection of Impressionists) and two or three are from the Musee d'Orsay. One came from the Getty, another was visiting from Boston, and still another is on loan from the Serbian National Museum in Belgrade. It was exhilarating to look our fill at the paintings, then walk a few blocks down the hill to the cathedral itself, which is undergoing a careful cleaning process to restore the original colors of its limestone facade.

Rouen is worth a trip, with or without a special exhibition. In spite of heavy damage during WWII, its medieval center survives, and there are imaginative new buildings to fill in some of the blank spots. We stayed overnight in a small hotel near the center, and particularly enjoyed a lunch of the local specialty - crepes (both savory and sweet.)

CPR for the blog...

Although I was tempted to delete the last post, so I could re-use the title, I published it anyway, almost ten days after writing.

It seemed easier to blog on the spring trip, partly because Leah was so involved in journal-keeping. Here in Paris, where I've already had as long a stay (3 nights) as anywhere else since leaving home, I'm aiming to get back in the groove.

The new bank card DID come, delivered to Salzburg by FedEx, as promised, last Thursday. My host and hostess (who probably worried about having me on their hands for weeks if the card did not arrive) rejoiced with me; and after I returned from the nearest ATM with cash in hand, we celebrated with a glass of Poire William.

In Salzburg it rained. "Now you know why Austria is so green," said my host. All through the trip weather has been either hot or wet, or cold, without much in between.

Only someone from the Northwest would expect temperate weather in July and August. In Paris mornings are fairly cool so far, but by mid-afternoon people who left home in sweaters and jackets look very much out of place. Today it seemed there might be a thunderstorm to cool things off, as dark clouds piled up all afternoon, but tonight it's clear outside, and the only breeze anywhere is from a big fan stirring the living room air.

Everything you have heard about Paris in August is true. Even in heavily-touristed areas, most of the small shops and restaurants are closed for "les vacances," leaving courteous little signs on the door with a reopening date. Here in the 17th many shopowners cover display windows with brown paper before leaving for the beach or the mountains, and some blocks have nothing but blank storefronts. The good bakery and the butcher/deli are both closed, but Monoprix is open and lively (and air-conditioned!)

Upside of all this is that you can cross streets without taking your life in your hands. Yesterday the "velib" (rental bike) stands were all nearly empty, as people rolled through Paris on two wheels, taking advantage of light traffic.

I found the Sunday crowds - at Place Bastille, where every cafe was full after the morning market shut down, and at the Pinacotheque, a museum near the Madeleine, where it was the last day for an extensive retrospective of art by Edvard Munch.

Titled the "anti-cri," the show was an energetic effort to show that Munch did, after all, do something besides "The Scream" (called "Le Cri" in French.) And it was fascinating, because he DID produce masses of work, in many media, over a long and prolific artistic life. I particularly liked the woodblock prints he did early in the 20th century. Although many were monoprints, with just one color added, he often went back and hand-colored later versions, with some very interesting results. Toward the end of his life Munch even got interested in film, and at least one grayish, blurry, jerky production survives.

Today it was on to the Orangerie, the only place to see Impressionists in Paris just now (because the collection of the Musee d'Orsay is on tour while museum renovations are underway.)

Last time I was in the Orangerie was almost 30 years ago, when it held all the Impressionist works, and displayed them very badly ("skying" is the term - you could get a very stiff neck from trying to see the paintings.)

Eventually the museum was extensively remodeled, primarily to display Monet's huge "Waterlilies" panels in a large oval room all their own. They are the main reason to visit the Orangerie - I think the Musee d'Orsay carried off the best of the rest of the collection, leaving behind only a few gems and a lot of nice little paintings by famous artists.

It's one of the few museums open on Monday (another is the Cluny, a really marvellous place.) One aim of this sojourn in Paris is to lengthen the list of small out-of-the-way museums I have seen. On Saturday I made a good beginning by visiting the Musee Balzac in the 16th. It's interesting because it is one of the few buildings remaining from when Passy (now a very elegant district full of tall Belle Epoque apartment buildings) was the country - a place where Balzac could write and edit feverishly to make publisher's deadlines, and hide out from his creditors. Not many people find the museum, which is just as well, since rooms in the 18th-century house are very small.

I do have pictures from Paris, but not on the computer as yet. This shot was to test the zoom on the new camera, to see if it would pull in the view of the ruined fortress above the village.
(On the "Friends of Torockoszentgyorgy" Facebook page, another recent American visitor suggested we create an "I left my heart in TSG" bumper sticker...

The blog lives - I think!

I know - I promised my five (possibly six or seven) readers that there WOULD be a blog on this trip. It could still happen.

Today the word is that I need to travel with a cellphone.

It's not that I'm a luddite. In my luggage are a notebook, an iPod Touch, and a small digital camera. Generally I rely on e-mail and the net for communication and information, and generally that works well.

Then I got the dreaded "card denied" incident. Today. Saturday. High noon in Vienna, where most ATM machines are behind doors you have to open with a credit card, and almost everything official begins to shut down at about 1 p.m. Fortunately, there are still a few decent phone booths, but they have no doors, and are located on busy streets. And the "international operator" (I suspect an international imposter) assures you that in spite of what your bank said, the number you have just given him is not one he can dial free of charge. Fortunately, my other credit card still works.

So --- two phone calls, separated by a dash across the street, to get money while my card is (temporarily - 20 minutes to be exact) valid. A new card is being sent to me because somehow the old one has been hacked. Against a background of revving diesel engines, I spelled out a complicated Salzburg address where FedEx may find me next week. Stay tuned.

Other than that, Vienna is a pleasant place to be, especially since at the moment it is not suffering from the hot weather so prevalent farther east.

Picture is from Emma's yard in the village. Chicks were a day old, and would normally still have been inside, but, as Emma explained, this hen has "a mind of her own," and wants to be outside.